Figure 3. Trump XV, The Devil, Lucifer in his aged and corrupted form. As the Father of Fear, he has horns and batlike wings. Below him, two Lovers, Adam and Eve (Trump VI), are chained in darkness at his feet. Note how comfortable they appear in their chains, so loose around their wrists that they could free themselves at any time if they so desired.
THANATOMANIA, 1963–1964
KENNETH ANGER WAS WALKING by the boardwalk on Coney Island one afternoon when he came across a group of boys working on their motorcycles. They were working-class kids, mostly Italian and Irish, their hair greased back in the manner of James Dean or Marlon Brando. From a distance at first, then closer, Anger watched them as they ratcheted and stared at their engines, their triceps shifting in the broken light, shaded by the boardwalk’s wooden planking.
He didn’t approach them that first day. Even on that hot afternoon, he was dressed entirely in black, except for a pale lime silk scarf around his neck. Surely the boys would see what he was, but then again what was he? The boys would never have guessed that a person like him would have tattoos on his forearms and wrists. A pentagram, an Eye of Horus, a scorpion — his rising sign, a sign associated with trickery and deceit. They would never have guessed that among other things, Anger thought of them as brothers in arms.
He was living in Brooklyn Heights now, penniless, sleeping on the roof of an apartment building in what could only be described as a shanty. It was a small metal shed without windows. Inside, he had a mattress and a kerosene lantern and an assortment of mugs. The shed and the apartment below it belonged to a film professor and his wife, Eliot and Beverly Gance, whose hatred for each other was like a cunning distraction from the doom that seemed to thicken the air around them: their sagging thoraxes, their nicotine breath, the haunted, midday fatigue that permeated their rooms. The Gances would start drinking on a Friday afternoon and not stop until Monday morning, during which time Anger would witness their brawls — broken dishes, humiliating sexual accusations, suicide threats, then a shoving match with drinks and cigarettes in hand along the raised brick edge of the roof where Anger had his shed. His presence seemed to reassure both of them into further flights of aggression. He didn’t have to pay the Gances rent, but he seemed to be paying them instead through a steady depletion of his own vitality.
More and more, both he and the world around him seemed on the verge of a breaking point. He could feel suppressed hostility running like an invisible current through the city’s televisions and the flickering lights of its subway cars. If it wasn’t the fear of Communists, it was the fear of Negroes. If it wasn’t the race to blow up the world, it was the race to send dogs or monkeys to the moon.
There were nights when it was too hot to sleep in the metal shed, and so he would spread one of his sheets out over the asphalt roof and look across the moonlit river to the speckled towers of Manhattan. He had friends there, and there were circles of people who knew his work and screened his films and had him over to their apartments for dinner. Afterward, he would sometimes go in search of boys, lost drifters in denim jackets or mechanic’s clothes, Lucifers, he called them, like so many avatars of his teenage crush, Ted Drake. They were mostly straight kids, hungry for a steak dinner, young enough to think of him as old, not fooled for a minute into thinking he was anything like them. When he got them alone, they were often as passive as ghosts, but sometimes there was a muscular scorn that brought him into contact with the real thing — a clenched fist at the end of a forearm, the edges of a ring abrading the bones of his back. What mattered was the first flash of desire, that almost nonexistent few moments when you could confront someone purely as a body and perhaps be confronted yourself in the same way, divorced from the dull facts of who you were. After that, things could only be tedious — two men talking to each other like ironic girls.
He believed that his films were lasting works of art, but perhaps this idea was evasive. Perhaps it was a way to justify being thirty-five and living in a metal shed on someone else’s roof.
He presented himself to the boys with the motorcycles as a camera enthusiast, a solemn man in his thirties who despite his whispery voice seemed to know something about tools. He bought them beer, and over the course of the next few days he filmed them as they moved in a crouch around the concrete floors of their garages, smoking cigarettes as they turned the wrench on a crankshaft or fitted a gas tank back into its slot. He filmed their gearboxes and sprockets, the pages of their repair manuals, the red taillights and chains and batteries laid out on the gray tarpaulin in the garage’s dark corner. None of them did well under the camera’s gaze for more than a minute or two. Being watched changed them, made them self-conscious. It got him thinking about the wavering line between fakery and authenticity, the way a dangerous pose sets up the expectation for actual danger.
Because what was a motorcycle for, if not to flirt with the crash? And what was the point of all that tangible speed, if not to outrace age and move directly to the end?
He didn’t remember where he’d come across the word “thanatomania.” When he looked it up in the Gances’ dictionary it wasn’t there, but he couldn’t help thinking that this word held the key to whatever it was he was sensing all around him. The vague restlessness seemed to have its source in some unspoken, half-yearning fascination with death. It didn’t escape him that those boys with their motorcycles made a perfect tableau of aggression and indifference. Their bikes, fitted with neat round mirrors on either side of the crossbars, were just like the spartan racing bikes that Jean Cocteau had chosen for the minions of the underworld in his film Orpheus.
About a week after he’d filmed the bikers, he met a thirty-one-year-old hustler named Bruce Byron outside a movie theater in Times Square. Byron wore a cowboy hat and a denim jacket that made him look rangier and younger than he was. He was good-looking in a blue-collar way. But it didn’t matter, since Anger was in that state of obsession now where everything he saw or heard became related to what he was working on and immediately found its rightful place. When he mentioned the biker movie, the response was silence: Bruce Byron squinting off into the distance, his eyes shadowed by the bent brim of his hat, his cheap boots creaking above the hot sheen of the sidewalk.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” said Anger.
“Maybe I’d be interested,” said Byron. He was still looking off down the street, lightly drumming his fingers on the edge of his thigh.
“Why don’t you give me your phone number?” said Anger. “I’ll call you later.”
“I don’t know about the phone.”
Perhaps part of the problem was that Anger had a mild crush on him. Perhaps he couldn’t quite forgive Bruce Byron for the matter-of-fact perfection of his ears, the stubbled contours of his chin, the way his small eyes focused so tightly on whatever they were trying to decipher.
A few days later, they met at Byron’s apartment, a walk-up on Tenth Avenue with red curtains patterned with silver snowflakes that were somehow strangely futuristic. Atop the television was a picture of a woman who might have been Byron’s sister, a comb in her brown bouffant, rheumy eyes that peeled down a little too far at the bottoms, like certain dogs’. Anger began setting up lights in the corners of the apartment’s only room, training them on a sagging bed with a loud scarlet coverlet. He had brought along two shopping bags full of props: leather jackets, engineer’s boots, a plastic skull, several posters, ashtrays, doilies, and commemorative plates emblazoned with the faces of Marlon Brando and James Dean. He arranged this paraphernalia around the room, replacing the decorative prints of Hawaiian beach scenes and the Golden Gate Bridge. This décor suddenly made more sense when Byron picked up the photograph of the woman on the TV and mentioned that she was his wife.